


from madrid to heaven

by darkavenue



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: M/M, Missing Scene, crowley gets called out with spanish idioms, spanish wordplay, translations in footnotes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-13 00:06:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19239835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkavenue/pseuds/darkavenue
Summary: On the bus out of Tadfield, Crowley feels unusually conscious of Aziraphale sitting in the seat next to him. Their shoulders touch. He doesn’t know where to look, so he turns his gaze to a smudge on the window and he thinks of Madrid.[Two missing scenes from the last episode.]





	1. Chapter 1

The children piled into Mr. Young’s dinky little car and it had driven off. Madame Tracy and Mr. Shadwell strapped on their helmets and rolled off on that dinky little scooter. That leaves Newt and Anathema to trod their way back to whatever thing they’d rolled in on.

“We could give you a ride. We’re parked just at the edge of the perimeter,” Newt offers.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale accepts.

He and Crowley follow the humans toward a gap in the distant chain link.

“So, you were saying?” Anathema sidles right up to Aziraphale and gives a pointed look to Crowley as she adds, “Before someone shushed you.”

Aziraphale lights up. “Oh, right! Well, in the garden…”

It takes several long-winded minutes just to get to Mesopotamia, so that’s where Crowley cuts in to pick up the pace. “Yeah, the ark.”

“I was getting there—”

“Sure. Then there was Jesus and then the Roman empire.”

“You tried your first oyster—”

“Mhm. Notable point in history.”

He rattles off all the major bullet points like a We Didn’t Start the Fire remix, allowing Aziraphale just enough to express the first thought on each before moving on to the next. The Crusades. The Globe Theatre. The guillotine. Witch Burnings. The Spanish Inquisition—

“You said you weren’t there for that one,” Aziraphale points out.

“I  _was_  there. At the right time. Not exactly the same places, though.”

“You were in Spain for the entire Inquisition?” Anathema asks.

Crowley shrugs. “Yeah, probably.”

He has no idea how long the thing actually ran.

She hums and gives him an appraising look. “Aprendiste algo cuando estuviste?” [1]

“Bastante.”

She smiles and it gives Crowley the smug feeling of having passed a test without trying. The conversation continues. In English, so as not to exclude the other two. After a silent struggle to cram his long legs into Dick Turpin’s narrow back seat, he does Anathema the favor of skipping ahead to Adam Young’s delivery. They cover most of the basics, in the convoluted way anything gets covered when Aziraphale and Crowley are explaining it at the same time.

“There’s the bus stop,” Newt interrupts, pulling the car to a halt at the curb. He turns in his seat to face them. “What will you do now?”

“I don’t know,” Aziraphale answers. Honest, lost, and soft.

“I will fall face first into bed and sleep for a week,” Crowley answers. No exaggeration.

Anathema turns in her seat and says, sweetly, “Entonces, que duermas con los angelitos.” [2]

Crowley’s jaw drops. He wonders if it’s unintentional—Nope. She’s not breaking eye contact. She knows what she said.

“What was that?” Aziraphale asks, oblivious.

Anathema looks at him, then back at Crowley. 

“She said sleep well,” he mumbles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1 “Learn anything while you were there?” “Quite a bit.”  
> 2 Conversationally, “Sleep well.” Literally, “Sleep with the angels.”
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> [Click here to see a comic based on this chapter by dotstronaut!](https://dotstronaut.tumblr.com/post/185611706228/you-were-in-spain-for-the-entire-inquisition)


	2. Chapter 2

On the bus, Crowley feels unusually conscious of Aziraphale sitting in the seat next to him. Their shoulders touch. He doesn’t know where to look, so he turns his gaze to a smudge on the window and he thinks of Madrid.

He remembers an Andalusian dancer he bumped into repeatedly. Literally bumped into. She was a performer at his favorite night spot who desperately needed glasses, but refused to wear them for aesthetic reasons. So graceful during her rehearsed routines, but a hurricane of a person the moment she stepped off the stage. Five hundred years later, he’s thinking of the night she taught him the meaning of the phrase ‘ _de Madrid al cielo, y, en el cielo, un agujerito para verlo.’_ [1]

“From Madrid to the sky,” he took her by the elbow moments before she knocked right into a table of men playing cards and tugged her in the opposite direction, “I keep hearing people say that. Why?”

“Oh! See, we all take pride living here, so that’s the local catchprase.” She let herself be led by the arm through the dark, smoky room. “We shorten it to ‘ _from Madrid to the sky_ ,’ because the entire phrase is so well known.”

“And the entire phrase is?”

_“From Madrid to the sky, and, in the sky, a little hole to see it from.”_ [2]

Crowley hummed thoughtfully. “I don’t get it.”

“It means that when you go to heaven—” She loved to speak with her hands. So, with the arm he wasn’t holding, her lightsome fingertips lifted up toward the ceiling. “The least you could ask for is that there will be a tiny little hole in paradise,” with a delicate flourish, the hand came down to her face and she made a pinching gesture in front of one eye, “from where you can look down and still see Madrid.”

“That… That’s frightening.”

“Wha—Why— _What?_ It’s  _beautiful._ ”

“You’re not going to see shit from the sky if you don’t get glasses, I keep telling you.”

“Never.” She pulled her arm away from him and slapped his shoulder just a  _little_ bit too hard to be only playing. Her eyes were a real sore spot, then.

“ _Ouch_ , fine—Goodnight, then.”

“Goodnight. Que sueñes con los angeles.” [3]  


All sarcastic like that was how Crowley heard the phrase for the first time. As he walked away, he quipped back, “Siempre.”

He meantit sarcastically in return. What he hadn’t meant at all was for it to be completely true.

Five hundred years later, on the bus out of Tadfield, Aziraphale asks, “What’s on your mind?”

Madrid. You. The blind dancer. The witch. Heaven. You. Always.

“Is there a little hole Upstairs where you can squat down and get a peek at Madrid?”

In the reflection, he sees Aziraphale’s eyebrows scrunch together. “How did you know about that?”

“ _What?_ ” Crowley slaps his own legs and his incredulous face pivots from the window to Aziraphale. “It’s  _real?”_

“No,  _but,_  in  _several_ check-ins, Gabriel wanted to know why the Spanish keep asking for it.  _What does it mean?”_

Crowley tells him the story. All the way up to ' _Siempre.'_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1 See 2  
> 2 See 1  
> 3 “Dream of angels.” “Always do.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] from madrid to heaven](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20865164) by [CurryDraws](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CurryDraws/pseuds/CurryDraws)




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